Eating Green on St. Patrick’s Day Without Food Dyes

As you may have gleaned from my red velvet cake post, we’re not too keen on food dyes. This can make life difficult when faced with the moral dilemma of how to celebrate things like St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, or really any holiday ever. Still, we try not to be complete party poopers, especially since we have kids that are just discovering the joys of celebrating holidays. Here are some ideas we came up with for how to eat green on St. Patrick’s Day without food dyes.

Mix in some spinach. What better way to start St. Patrick’s Day than with spinach, feta, and sundried tomato eggs and a tropical green smoothie for breakfast?
Green Sides. Whether that’s a regular old salad or side of broccoli or some chips with our Ultra Salsa Verde.
Pesto. Whether that’s on pasta or in the middle of our Dalton Sandwiches.
Avocados. With a fried egg, on our citrus, bacon, and avocado salad, atop a black bean burger, or mixed up as guacamole. You can never go wrong with avocados.
Limes. Whether that’s in a main dish like our chicken in cilantro lime cream sauce, as a garnish like in our pork posole, or in a delightful dessert (I’ve got these Coconut Lime Cupcakes on my Recipes to Try Pinboard and I love these frozen coconut limeades.)
Bonus: Go for the spirit of green. Even when the mint items aren’t dyed green, I still get the green vibe from them. (If you’re being fancy and using actual mint leaves in something you won’t even need to imagine.) I’m making two batches of these grasshopper brownies for a church function (make sure you read the notes on how much cream to use) and by swapping mint extract for vanilla in our homemade oreos you can make Cool Mint or Grasshopper Oreos.